Macular Hole

by Wagner, Catherine

• ISBN13: 9780974090917
• ISBN10: 0974090913
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Fence Books

Summary

Wagner's poems proclaim, among other things, a finitude--"I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake"--that is anything but final, that is instead embodied and generative. From the completion of the human body arise the actions of the human mind; it is these that Wagner charts, with affection, detachment, a measured embarrassment, and a calculated grossness, in defiance of all recommendation. That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perception, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; domestic arrangement, satisfactory and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical: Its subjects range from the controlled experiment of selfhood to the blooming and pruning of personal dynamics on a road-trip to " . . . God and country / given up and given." In this, Catherine Wagner's second book, we spy a poet espousing, somewhat fearful of her mandate and putting that fear to good use in the service of real exchange.

Author Biography

CATHERINE WAGNER was born to missionary parents in Burma and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Wagner is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and the University of Utah's Ph.D in Literature program. She lives with her husband, the poet Martin Corless-Smith, and their young son Ambrose, in Boise, Idaho and Cornwall, England.

Table of Contents

My what to replace my	1	(2)
I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake	3	(2)
The divinity of man	5	(1)
I was at congress with myself	6	(1)
I walked in the house	7	(4)
Kill so we feel safe and comfortable	11	(1)
Freely esposa	12	(3)
Wrought in filigree and wrought in granite	15	(1)
Scary ballad	16	(1)
Song	17	(1)
A bash, and I wanna look good	18	(2)
San Francisco ballad	20	(1)
An hendy hap	21	(2)
There was a place in the brain, a red knot	23	(2)
Big bang	25	(1)
Who admitted you?	26	(1)
Song: Scary several light	27	(3)
Perfect love	30	(3)
Inmost	33	(3)
For you everywhere Phoebus the fields of song are laid out	36	(3)
Imitating	39	(12)
Coming toward me	51	(1)
Not very much is abstracted	52	(1)
Allied with it were all receptacles	53	(1)
Spatchcocked boy, broken in transmission	54	(1)
Macular Hole	55	(2)
I don't believe in bodiless	57	(1)
Levee	58	(1)
I awake possessed by God	59	(1)
Resume, face	60	(1)
The violent career of God	61	(2)
Induce	63